Women and sport in South Africa: shaped by history and shaping sporting history.

Abstract

Much has been written about the relationship between sport and politics in South Africa (SA). Unfortunately, the contributions of sporting females are largely invisible in these accounts. It is only since the late 1990s that scholars have begun to research the various histories around females and sport in SA. Through the work of Hargreaves (1997, 2000) more is known about the contribution to the anti-apartheid movement by Coloured1 female sports-activists through their membership of the South African Council on Sport (SACOS). My account of the sporting career of a leading Coloured female in South African karate illustrates how the history of women and sport is both a history of the politics of the country, as well as a history of the restructuring and transformation of gender relations (Jones 2001a), while my analysis of ‘gender, race, class and sport in the history of South Africa’ (Jones 2001b) shows how the life circumstances of South African females impacted on the way they related to sporting practices at the time. Except for a report by the Sports Information and Sciences Agency (1997) and Burnett’s (2001) analysis of the gendered representation of high performance sport in SA, little other quantitative research exists on the participation of females in South African sport. In contrast, the developments around women and sport in SA since the late 1980s have received a great deal of attention, because they coincided with the democratisation of South African society and the unification of different sporting cultures in the country. This chapter is an attempt to give an account of these developments against the backdrop of the history of sport in a racially divided SA. Where available, quantitative data will be included.